One of my strongest childhood memories comes from living at No. 4 Trenchard Close, in the officers’ married quarters at RAF Aldergrove between 1968 and 1975.

Looking back now, it seems completely mad.

As kids, we used to crawl through the barbed wire and make our way over to the civil side of the airfield to watch the aircraft. Not from a sensible distance either. We would get right up to the edge of the runway.

We did it dozens of times and never thought much about it. To us it was just adventure. Aeroplanes, noise, excitement, and the simple thrill of getting away with something.

What makes it all the more extraordinary now is the setting.

This was not some quiet airfield. This was Aldergrove during the height of the Troubles. Security was tight. Police and soldiers were everywhere, carrying live weapons, and the situation across Northern Ireland was tense and dangerous.

But as children, we didn’t see any of that. We only saw the aircraft.

Eventually, our luck ran out.

One day we were caught. Thankfully it was the RAF Police who found us, not the Army. We were taken up to the tower for a proper bollocking, and no doubt we deserved every word of it.

But while the adults were focused on where we shouldn’t have been, something else was happening for me.

I was completely mesmerised by what was going on in that tower.

I can still picture it now. The view across the airfield. The constant movement. The radios. The calm voices controlling something that, to me, looked impossibly important.

I had gone up there in trouble, but the telling-off barely registered. I was far too busy taking it all in.

That moment never left me.

It’s one of those strange twists in life. A childhood escapade that could have ended very differently instead became the thing that pointed me towards my future.

I went into that tower as a boy who had been somewhere he shouldn’t have been, and came away with the first real glimpse of what I wanted my life to be about.

So when I look back on Aldergrove, I don’t just remember married quarters or the atmosphere of those years. I remember crawling through barbed wire, getting caught at last, and then standing in the very place that quietly set the course for the rest of my life.

Funny how things turn out.